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Jethro Tull/A Passion Play (an extended performance)

After a forty-year span of time, this wonderfully intricate quasi-progressive masterpiece has resurfaced itself for our listening pleasure with its most interesting counterparts at its side. This was not only a massive challenge for the band, even at times disliking its intricacies at a live performance, but it still leaves fellow Tullians with an appreciation for the recording. Embarking on yet another extended forty-five minute epic piece of music, Jethro Tull places the bits of what once were individual songs and recreates them into one. Nevertheless, not losing the originals. The “Nightcap” album holds these semi-flawed, semi-wondrous melodies of what once was.

This was…

After enduring a disastrous visit to a third-rate recording studio and feeling the full weight of its lowly atmosphere, the remnants gave birth to “A Passion Play”. Living through a more than unacceptable response from critics, Jethro Tull had become dismayed. Of course, their audience profusely disagreed, sending “A Passion Play” high on the charts in America (lower in the motherland), indicating that it was the critics that were a disappointment and not the band.

There had been a massive overload of loops and overdubs on the album making it difficult to reproduce in a live arena as you will find each of the band mates express in the colorful and in-depth information gathered in the astonishing book that completes the package of this fortieth anniversary edition. There you find the original “A Passion Play” recording as well as the new mix with a few more lines for good measure, as well as the original music prior to the birth of the Passion. The recordings are dynamic and for those of you who have seen this album performed live as I did, it will be a treat to the senses (it wasn’t easy convincing my parents to let me attend a concert at such a young age, but worth the results).

The grandness continues with a pair of DVD’s encompassing additional music as well as the live version of “The Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles”, and the original intro and outro footage of the Passion’s ballerina.

This is more than a collectible, it’s a nostalgic memory for those who have a passion to play it…